Schizophrenic Intellectual Impairment; Uniform or Differential?

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to test the hypothesis that differential impairment of performance on intellectual tasks is a concomitant of schizophrenia. Although the results of previous investigations have been contradictory and generally confusing with regard to this hypothesis, there has been very general agreement with the restricted specification that schizophrenia is accompanied by impaired performance on tests that require abstract conceptualization. On the basis of the many previous studies supporting this latter more restricted hypothesis, the underlying hypothesis of this study could be stated in the more specific form that schizophrenics show greater impairment in tasks that require abstraction and generalization than they do in tasks that require the reproduction, in a familiar and routine manner, of previously learned material.Reviews of the scores of studies on the concept of dif-